The Insomniac Coder

  The concept is dead simple: when the pencil is short enough to be a pain to use, plug the next pencil into it. This gives you the right leverage to keep using the pencil until it is truly gone. The sad thing is this is an invention that is at least 10 years too late, unless artists are willing to take the brunt of the increased costs from retooling pencil machines that have not changed in what? 100 years? That said the rest of the developing world is using pencils, and I am sure that using that last couple of inches of pencil is going to save so much that they should probably make these mandatory.  Related articles by Zemanta Continuous Pencil Means No More Stubs (wired.com)

Image via Wikipedia Wanna know how you know you're old? My high school drafting classes were all done with mechanic pencil, on proper paper and drafting tables. Worse, we were the last class in my university to train in paper drafting for our engineering drawing courses, we were the pilot class for ACAD, the next class was 50/50, and the "kids" that arrived two years later did all their coursework in ACAD. My favorite part was watching people do some sloppy shiat thinking nobody could tell just by looking at the screen. You can easily grade paper drawings by looking at the smoothness of the pencil lines , but on screen all you see is a straight line. The trick is to have the student send the drawing to a pen plotter , if the student did something stupid, it will show up when the pen plotter draws it. For example, curve transitions that are not snapped properly, chamfers, compound curves, or even lines that don't connect properly. Related articles by Zemanta A...